what I learned over the years

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“How To Scale a Development Team” a la a Tornado of Razorblades

The key to a good team is a well-defined sphere of authority, with clear interfaces to other teams. The team should own the vision and direction for the part of your product that it works on. It should be able to operate with maximum autonomy on everything it owns without having to ask for permission or information from other teams, except for the infrequent case of a feature or bug that crosses team boundaries.

The tornado of razor blades always has good insight into subtle problems that you might face. There’s a lot of absorb in there, but I picked up on this particular point: That you have to delegate, but also give maximum autonomy and without having to ask for permission for whatever it decides to do.

We’re not at this point yet, but lessons are better kept in mind and revisited later. I imagine it’s easy to say, hard to do.